Monday, March 13, 2006

Dark Mistress of Dining Logistics, that's me.


The dinner I'm running continues to go well, despite the people who register ten days late AND get all pissy when I say I can't seat them with their friends. Yesterday, I took RSVPs for awhile after church. When someone would come and talk to me about how wonderful it was to meet new people and how anyone who just wanted to sit with their friends was silly, I would keep that person talking on that subject for a long time. Setting a good example.


I was reminded yesterday how very sweet and adorable members of my church can be. A whole ton of them volunteered to help. So that's good. I seated myself with some people I like and some people I'd like to get to know better both nights, including a gothy youth whom I think theCSO would appreciate. A really charming older couple came up and thanked me profusely for their table arrangement, crowing happily how they were with some people they really liked and a few new people so they'd have a chance to make new friends. Made me a happy girl.
I don't know even half the people at my fairly large church, so I can't do this for everyone, but I really made an effort to seat people with other people whom they
might find interesting. Hard in the case of husbands who rarely go to church, but I did my best. My experience is that engineers can almost always talk to one another, so I tried to group engineer husbands. I seated new members with interesting long-term members.
The varying ways people can approach these things really amazes me. Some people make a very reasonable request (e.g. "Can I get a meal without cheese? I'm lactose intolerant...") and apologise for it profusely. People with dietary requirements have an unreasonably bad rap on this issue. It's something that caterers are pretty hip to, so if you ever need something like that, ask well in advance, but ask, we can normally help you out. It takes the person who is organizing a few phone calls, but if you're nice about it, we don't care.
People have asked for far more unreasonable things far less nicely. This is how they get seated with the people whom I consider the church's biggest whiners.


CC

Ps. Folks who know HTML--You can see what I am trying to do with these pull quotes here. Any clues on how to make the text properly wrap around the pull quote? Thankee--

1 comment:

Obijuan said...

Place the code for the pull quote inside a single cell table, then place the table code in the main text where you want the pull quote to appear. The remaining text should wrap around. You'll need to play with alignments and such a little bit until you get the layout you want.